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Re: arsclist Digital knowledge preservation
At 10:24 AM 6/18/2002 -0700, Mike Richter wrote:
At 09:33 AM 6/18/2002 -0700, Richard L. Hess wrote:
One thing to consider in selecting a format to store to is that it is
truly as lossless as possible for the vast majority of material contained
in the archive. On the other hand, the format has to be well-supported
with the anticipation that players will be available long into the future.
There is lossless compression available for digital audio. Two options are
MonkeysAudio (my choice) and Shorten. I verified that there were no losses
by compressing a file, uncompressing it, and comparing the result with the
original. They are identical at the bit level. However, the available
compression is only of the order of a factor of two. Whether that is
sufficient to be worthwhile and whether the code is likely to be available
indefinitely or for different platforms are factors in the choice. For my
purposes, lossless as well as lossy compression has its place.
Agreed.
Note that in many contexts I refer to the MP3 discs as catalogues of the
originals. Thought of in that light, their role is easier to recognize.
They are (cross-)indexed representations of the archival material.
Fidelity is sufficient for the purpose just as a catalogue of an art
exhibit is sufficient for its purpose - and no one would confuse the
representation in the catalogue with the original.
There was an implication in this thread that the only retained preservation
copies of certain material were the MP3s. While the CBC is doing this for
their talk programming, they are retaining full-bandwidth, uncompressed
copies (48/16 or 44.1/16 at least) of their music programming.
I was heartened to hear that two uncompressed digital copies of the
material are being retained in geographically diverse areas.
The catalogue concept as described above is certainly a very useful way for
people to access material. It brings accessibility and the ability to truly
learn from the material to new heights.
Having widely distributed proxies (or surrogates as I understand the film
archive community prefers to call them) is a very useful process. In fact,
good proxies can substitute for the originals in many applications. But
knowing where the best copies are is essential for a few applications.
Cheers,
Richard
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